Logic

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Logic (from Classical Greek λόγος (logos): reason or account; also word, speech, or narration), is the study of the principles of reasoning and argumentation, particularly toward the analysis of arguments. Logic is usually considered one of the four classic branches of Philosophy (the others being epistemology, metaphysics, and axiology). Logic is a broad and ancient subject, and its exact definition remains, even today, a matter of controversy and discussion among philosophers. Since its earliest formal discussion in the Ancient Greek era, logic has branched into many approaches and disciplines, leaving a multitude of systems and methods, many of them dealing with the same concept in different ways. However, the subject is unified in that a principal task of the logician is the same across these branches: to advance an account of valid (i.e., correct) and fallacious (i.e., erroneous) inference and to develop practical techniques to determine into which of these classifications specific arguments fit.

Over the last one-hundred fifty years, logic has arguably developed more rapidly than throughout its previous history--particularly in the area known as "symbolic" or "mathematical" logic, and has become a major area in mathematics. The mathematical treatment of logic has strongly influenced its philosophical application, and logic has thus become an area of confluence and intersection of mathematics and philosophy. Logic is also studied and applied in such diverse areas as law, linguistics, computer science and artificial intelligence.

In this introductory article, the history of the subject is briefly sketched and several of the subject's notable areas of study are described. Links to more extensive specialized treatment are included throughout.

The formally sophisticated treatment of modern logic apparently descends from the Greek tradition, although it is suggested that the pioneers of Boolean logic were likely aware of Indian logic (Ganeri 2001). The Greek tradition itself comes mainly from the transmission of Aristotelian logic, which probably developed independently of Indian logic, and commentary upon it by Islamic philosophers to Medieval logicians. The traditions outside Europe did not survive into the modern era: in China, the tradition of scholarly investigation into logic was repressed by the Qin dynasty following the legalist philosophy of Han Feizi, in the Islamic world the rise of the Asharite school suppressed original work on logic.

During the medieval period, after it was shown that Aristotle's ideas were largely compatible with faith, a greater emphasis was placed upon Aristotle's logic. During the later period of the medieval ages, logic became a main focus of philosophers, who would engage in critical logical analyses of philosophical arguments.

Nature of logic

The nature of logic has been the object of intense dispute: it is not possible to clearly delineate the bounds of logic in terms acceptable to all rival viewpoints. Despite that controversy, the study of logic has been very coherent and technically grounded. Generally, Logic requires a binary truth value, meaning that a statement must be either entirely true or entirely false; or, if it is not entirely true, then it must be entirely false. So, logic does not consider the existence of "gray areas" or ambiguities, although some forms of logic include a third truth value, unknown.

Informal, formal, and symbolic logic

The crucial concept of form is central to discussions of the nature of logic, and it complicates exposition that 'formal' in "formal logic" is commonly used ambiguously. The following form the main branches of logic:

Formal logic is the study of inference with purely formal content, where that content is made explicit. (An inference possesses a purely formal content if it can be expressed as a particular application of a wholly abstract rule, that is, a rule that is not about any particular thing or property. We will see later that on many definitions of logic, logical inference and inference with purely formal content are the same thing. This does not render the notion of informal logic vacuous, since one may wish to investigate logic without committing to a particular formal analysis.)

Symbolic logic is the study of symbolic abstractions that capture the formal features of logical inference.

The ambiguity is that "formal logic" is very often used with the alternate meaning of symbolic logic as we have defined it, with informal logic meaning any logical investigation that does not involve symbolic abstraction; it is this sense of 'formal' that is parallel to the received usages coming from "formal languages" or "formal theory".

While formal logic is old, dating back more than two millennia, most of symbolic logic is comparatively new, and arises with the application of insights from mathematics to problems in logic. Generally, a symbolic logic is captured by a formal system, comprising a formal language including rules for creating expressions in the language, and a set of rules of derivation. The expressions will normally be intended to represent claims that we may be interested in, and likewise the rules of derivation represent inferences; such systems usually have an intended interpretation.

For example, consider a very simple formal system that has just the symbols "p", "q", and "and" in its language. Its only rules for creating expressions are (1) "'p and q' and 'q and p' are expressions" and (2) Any expression compounded with another by 'and" is also an expression". Its only rule of derivation is "from any expression of the form 'p and q', you may conclude 'p'". The intended interpretation of the "p" and "q" is that they stand for any sentence. The intended interpretation of 'and' is expressed by specifying when sentences that contain 'and' are true. Most systems would interpret 'and' like this: sentences containing 'and' are true only when the expressions on either side of it (both of them) are true.

A formal system can also have axioms. An axiom is a sentence that counts as always true within the system. For example, many systems have as an axiom the sentence "If P implies Q and P is the case, then Q is the case." To go along with the axioms the system will have a special rule of derivation, called the 'rule of substitution'. It says that you can derive from any axiom a sentence that is just like it, except that other sentences have been substituted for the 'P' and the 'Q'. For example, from the axiom above, we can conclude the following: "If R&S implies that T or U, and R&S is the case; then it is the case that T or U." (This assumes that "R&S" and "T or U" are expressions in the formal system.) Most formal systems have either a rich set of rules of derivation, but few or no axioms; or a rich set of axioms but only the derivation rule of substitution.

Sentences that are derived using the system's axioms and rules of derivation are called theorems.

Consistency, soundness, and completeness

There are three valuable properties that formal systems can have:

Consistency, which means that none of the theorems of the system contradict

Soundness, which means that the system's rules of derivation will never let you infer anything false, so long as you start with only true premises. So if a system is sound (and its axioms, if any, are true), then the theorems of a sound formal system are the truths. All of the theorems of a system that has no axioms are its truths and sometimes the truths of such a system are called 'logical truths.' (Note that if a system is not consistent, it cannot be sound. This is because a contradiction is always false, so if two theorems contradict at least one is false.)

Completeness, which means that there are no true sentences in the system that cannot, at least in principle, be proved using the derivation rules (and axioms, if any) of the system.

Not all systems achieve all three virtues. It has been proven by Kurt Gödel that a system with enough axioms and/or rules of derivation to derive the principles of arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete. These are called Gödel's incompleteness theorems.

Rival conceptions of logic

Logic arose (see below) from a concern with correctness of argumentation. The conception of logic as the study of argument is historically fundamental, and was how the founders of distinct traditions of logic, namely Plato, Aristotle, Mozi and Aksapada Gautama, conceived of logic. Modern logicians usually wish to ensure that logic studies just those arguments that arise from appropriately general forms of inference; so for example the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says of logic that it does not, however, cover good reasoning as a whole. That is the job of the theory of rationality. Rather it deals with inferences whose validity can be traced back to the formal features of the representations that are involved in that inference, be they linguistic, mental, or other representations (Hofweber 2004).

By contrast Immanuel Kant introduced an alternative idea as to what logic is. He argued that logic should be conceived as the science of judgement, an idea taken up in Gottlob Frege's logical and philosophical work, where thought (German: Gedanke) is substituted for judgement (German: Urteil). On this conception, the valid inferences of logic follow from the structural features of judgements or thoughts.

A third view of logic arises from the idea that logic is more fundamental than reason, and so that logic is the science of states of affairs (German: Sachverhalt) in general. Barry Smith locates Franz Brentano as the source for this idea, an idea he claims reaches its fullest development in the work of Adolf Reinach (Smith 1989). This view of logic appears radically distinct from the first: on this conception logic has no essential connection with argument, and the study of fallacies and paradoxes no longer appears essential to the discipline.

Occasionally one encounters a fourth view as to what logic is about: it is a purely formal manipulation of symbols according to some prescribed rules. This conception can be criticized on the grounds that the manipulation of just any formal system is usually not regarded as logic. Such accounts normally omit an explanation of what it is about certain formal systems that makes them systems of logic.

Relation to other sciences

Logic is related to rationality and the structure of concepts, and so has a degree of overlap with psychology. Logic is generally understood to describe reasoning in a prescriptive manner (i.e. it describes how reasoning ought to take place), whereas psychology is descriptive, so the overlap is not so marked. Gottlob Frege, however, was adamant about anti-psychologism: that logic should be understood in a manner independent of the idiosyncrasies of how particular people might reason.

Deductive and inductive reasoning

Originally, logic consisted only of deductive reasoning which concerns what follows necessarily from given premises. However, inductive reasoning—the process of deriving a reliable generalization from observations—has sometimes been included in the study of logic. Correspondingly, we must distinguish between deductive validity and inductive validity. An inference is deductively valid if and only if there is no possible situation in which all the premises are true and the conclusion false. The notion of deductive validity can be rigorously stated for systems of formal logic in terms of the well-understood notions of semantics. Inductive validity on the other hand requires us to define a reliable generalization of some set of observations. The task of providing this definition may be approached in various ways, some less formal than others; some of these definitions may use mathematical models of probability. For the most part this discussion of logic deals only with deductive logic.

Topics in logic

Throughout history, there has been interest in distinguishing good from bad arguments, and so logic has been studied in some more or less familiar form.
Aristotelian logic has principally been concerned with teaching good argument, and is still taught with that end today, while in mathematical logic and analytical philosophy much greater emphasis is placed on logic as an object of study in its own right, and so logic is studied at a more abstract level.

Consideration of the different types of logic explains that logic is not studied in a vacuum. While logic often seems to provide its own motivations, the subject develops most healthily when the reason for our interest is made clear.

Syllogistic logic

The Organon was Aristotle's body of work on logic, with the Prior Analytics constituting the first explicit work in formal logic, introducing the syllogistic. The parts of syllogistic, also known by the name term logic, were the analysis of the judgements into propositions consisting of two terms that are related by one of a fixed number of relations, and the expression of inferences by means of syllogisms that consisted of two propositions sharing a common term as premise, and a conclusion which was a proposition involving the two unrelated terms from the premises.

Aristotle's work was regarded in classical times and from medieval times in Europe and the Middle East as the very picture of a fully worked out system. It was not alone: the Stoics proposed a system of propositional logic that was studied by medieval logicians; nor was the perfection of Aristotle's system undisputed; for example the problem of multiple generality was recognised in medieval times. Nonetheless, problems with syllogistic logic were not seen as being in need of revolutionary solutions.

Today, some academics claim that Aristotle's system is generally seen as having little more than historical value (though there is some current interest in extending term logics), regarded as made obsolete by the advent of sentential logic and the predicate calculus. Others use Aristotle in argumentation theory to help develop and critically question argumentation schemes that are used in artificial intelligence and legal arguments.

Predicate logic

Logic as it is studied today is a very different subject to that studied before, and the principal difference is the innovation of predicate logic. Whereas Aristotelian syllogistic logic specified the forms that the relevant part of the involved judgements took, predicate logic allows sentences to be analysed into subject and argument in several different ways, thus allowing predicate logic to solve the problem of multiple generality that had perplexed medieval logicians. With predicate logic, for the first time, logicians were able to give an account of quantifiers general enough to express all arguments occurring in natural language.

Modal logic

In languages, modality deals with the phenomenon that subparts of a sentence may have their semantics modified by special verbs or modal particles. For example, "We go to the games" can be modified to give "We should go to the games", and "We can go to the games"" and perhaps "We will go to the games". More abstractly, we might say that modality affects the circumstances in which we take an assertion to be satisfied.

Deduction and reasoning

The motivation for the study of logic in ancient times was clear, as we have described: it is so that we may learn to distinguish good from bad arguments, and so become more effective in argument and oratory, and perhaps also, to become a better person.

This motivation is still alive, although it no longer takes centre stage in the picture of logic; typically dialectical logic will form the heart of a course in critical thinking, a compulsory course at many universities, especially those that follow the American model.

Mathematical logic

Mathematical logic really refers to two distinct areas of research: the first is the application of the techniques of formal logic to mathematics and mathematical reasoning, and the second, in the other direction, the application of mathematical techniques to the representation and analysis of formal logic.

The earliest use of math and geometry in relation to logic and philosophy goes back to the ancient Greeks such as Euclid, Plato, and Aristotle. Many other ancient and medieval philosophers applied mathematical ideas and methods to their philosophical claims.

The boldest attempt to apply logic to mathematics was undoubtedly the logicism pioneered by philosopher-logicians such as Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell: the idea was that mathematical theories were logical tautologies, and the programme was to show this by means to a reduction of mathematics to logic. The various attempts to carry this out met with a series of failures, from the crippling of Frege's project in his Grundgesetze by Russell's paradox, to the defeat of Hilbert's Program by Gödel's incompleteness theorems.

Both the statement of Hilbert's Program and its refutation by Gödel depended upon their work establishing the second area of mathematical logic, the application of mathematics to logic in the form of proof theory. Despite the negative nature of the incompleteness theorems, Gödel's completeness theorem, a result in model theory and another application of mathematics to logic, can be understood as showing how close logicism came to being true: every rigorously defined mathematical theory can be exactly captured by a first-order logical theory; Frege's proof calculus is enough to describe the whole of mathematics, though not equivalent to it. Thus we see how complementary the two areas of mathematical logic have been.

If proof theory and model theory have been the foundation of mathematical logic, they have been but two of the four pillars of the subject. Set theory originated in the study of the infinite by Georg Cantor, and it has been the source of many of the most challenging and important issues in mathematical logic, from Cantor's theorem, through the status of the Axiom of Choice and the question of the independence of the continuum hypothesis, to the modern debate on large cardinal axioms.

Philosophical logic

Philosophical logic deals with formal descriptions of natural language. Most philosophers assume that the bulk of "normal" proper reasoning can be captured by logic, if one can find the right method for translating ordinary language into that logic. Philosophical logic is essentially a continuation of the traditional discipline that was called "Logic" before it was supplanted by the invention of mathematical logic. Philosophical logic has a much greater concern with the connection between natural language and logic. As a result, philosophical logicians have contributed a great deal to the development of non-standard logics (e.g., free logics, tense logics) as well as various extensions of classical logic (e.g., modal logics), and non-standard semantics for such logics (e.g., Kripke's technique of supervaluations in the semantics of logic).

Logic and the philosophy of language are closely related. Philosophy of language has to do with the study of how our language engages and interacts with our thinking. Logic has an immediate impact on other areas of study. Studying logic and the relationship between logic and ordinary speech can help a person better structure their own arguments and critique the arguments of others. Many popular arguments are filled with errors because so many people are untrained in logic and unaware of how to correctly formulate an argument.

Philosophy of language underwent a renaissance in the 20th century because of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

In the 1950s and 1960s, researchers predicted that when human knowledge could be expressed using logic with mathematical notation, it would be possible to create a machine that reasons, or artificial intelligence. This turned out to be more difficult than expected because of the complexity of human reasoning. In logic programming, a program consists of a set of axioms and rules. Logic programming systems such as Prolog compute the consequences of the axioms and rules in order to answer a query.

Furthermore, computers can be used as tools for logicians. For example, in symbolic logic and mathematical logic, proofs by humans can be computer-assisted. Using automated theorem proving the machines can find and check proofs, as well as work with proofs too lengthy to be written out by hand.

Argumentation Theory

Argumentation theory is the study and research of informal logic, fallacies, and critical questions as they relate to every day and practical situations. Specific types of dialogue can be analyzed and questioned to reveal premises, conclusions, and fallacies. Argumentation theory is now applied in artificial intelligence and law.

Controversies in logic

Just as we have seen there is disagreement over what logic is about, so there is disagreement about what logical truths there are.

Bivalence and the law of the excluded middle

The logics discussed above are all "bivalent" or "two-valued"; that is, they are most naturally understood as dividing propositions into the true and the false propositions. Systems which reject bivalence are known as non-classical logics.

Modal logic is not truth conditional, and so it has often been proposed as a non-classical logic. However, modal logic is normally formalised with the principle of the excluded middle, and its relational semantics is bivalent, so this inclusion is disputable. On the other hand, modal logic can be used to encode non-classical logics, such as intuitionistic logic.

Logics such as fuzzy logic have since been devised with an infinite number of "degrees of truth", represented by a real number between 0 and 1. Bayesian probability can be interpreted as a system of logic where probability is the subjective truth value.

Implication: strict or material?

It is obvious that the notion of implication formalised in classical logic does not comfortably translate into natural language by means of "if... then...", due to a number of
problems called the paradoxes of material implication.

The first class of paradoxes involves counterfactuals, such as "If the moon is made of green cheese, then 2+2=5", which are puzzling because natural language does not support the principle of explosion. Eliminating this class of paradoxes was the reason for C. I. Lewis's formulation of strict implication, which eventually led to more radically revisionist logics such as relevance logic.

The second class of paradoxes involves redundant premises, falsely suggesting that we know the succedent because of the antecedent: thus "if that man gets elected, granny will die" is materially true if granny happens to be in the last stages of a terminal illness, regardless of the man's election prospects. Such sentences violate the Gricean maxim of relevance, and can be modelled by logics that reject the principle of monotonicity of entailment, such as relevance logic.

Tolerating the impossible

Closely related to questions arising from the paradoxes of implication comes the radical suggestion that logic ought to tolerate inconsistency. Relevance logic and paraconsistent logic are the most important approaches here, though the concerns are different: a key consequence of classical logic and some of its rivals, such as intuitionistic logic, is that they respect the principle of explosion, which means that the logic collapses if it is capable of deriving a contradiction. Graham Priest, the main proponent of dialetheism, has argued for paraconsistency on the striking grounds that there are in fact, true contradictions (Priest 2004).

Is logic empirical?

What is the epistemological status of the laws of logic? What sort of arguments is appropriate for criticising purported principles of logic? In an influential paper entitled Is logic empirical?Hilary Putnam, building on a suggestion of W.V. Quine, argued that in general the facts of propositional logic have a similar epistemological status as facts about the physical universe, for example as the laws of mechanics or of general relativity, and in particular that what physicists have learned about quantum mechanics provides a compelling case for abandoning certain familiar principles of classical logic: if we want to be realists about the physical phenomena described by quantum theory, then we should abandon the principle of distributivity, substituting for classical logic the quantum logic proposed by Garrett Birkhoff and John von Neumann.

Another paper by the same name by Sir Michael Dummett argues that Putnam's desire for realism mandates the law of distributivity: distributivity of logic is essential for the realist's understanding of how propositions are true of the world, in just the same way as he has argued the principle of bivalence is. In this way, the question Is logic empirical? can be seen to lead naturally into the fundamental controversy in metaphysics on realism versus anti-realism.